Swapping characters, words and lines
Normal-mode commands Swap the current character (the character under the cursor) with the next: xp Swap the current character with the previous: Xp Swap the current line with the next (but see below for a better method): ddp Swap the current line with the previous: ddkP or ddkkp Swap the current word with the next (see note): dawwP dawelp hdeep (works at start of first word, useful if your separators aren't spaces) "xdiwdwep"xp (works with most punctuations too) Swap the current word with the previous (see note): dawbP Note: These swap-word techniques don't work with punctuation. Use the mappings below to more intelligently move words. However, for many more complex swaps, several plugins are available which often do a better job. Mappings See moving lines up or down for the best method to move lines. To use gc to swap the current character with the next, without changing the cursor position: :nnoremap gc xph To use gw to swap the current word with the next, without changing cursor position: (See note.) :nnoremap gw "_yiw:s/\(\%#\w\+\)\(\W\+\)\(\w\+\)/\3\2\1/:nohlsearch " This version will work across newlines: :nnoremap gw "_yiw:s/\(\%#\w\+\)\(\_W\+\)\(\w\+\)/\3\2\1/:nohlsearch To use gl to swap the current word with the previous, keeping cursor on current word: (This feels like "pushing" the word to the left.) (See note.) :nnoremap gl "_yiw?\w\+\_W\+\%#:s/\(\%#\w\+\)\(\_W\+\)\(\w\+\)/\3\2\1/:nohlsearch To use gr to swap the current word with the next, keeping cursor on current word: (This feels like "pushing" the word to the right.) (See note.) :nnoremap gr "_yiw:s/\(\%#\w\+\)\(\_W\+\)\(\w\+\)/\3\2\1//\w\+\_W\+:nohlsearch To use g{ to swap the current paragraph with the next: :nnoremap g{ {dap}p{ Note: Mappings above which perform a search-and-replace (ones containing :s//) will operate incorrectly on words with accented characters. To adjust the mappings above to work with your locale, replace all \w with [alphabet] and \W with ^''alphabet'', where alphabet is the set of characters in your alphabet. For ISO/IEC_8859-1 Latin-1 Supplement characters, substitute all \w instances with 0-9A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ_ and all \_W instances with \_^0-9A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ_. Visual-mode swapping To use this mapping: first, delete some text (using a command such as daw or dt in normal mode, or x in visual mode). Then, use visual mode to select some other text, and press Ctrl-X. The two pieces of text should then be swapped. :vnoremap `.``gvP``P Related plugins *vim-exchange Easy text exchange/swap operator *Visual Mode Based Swapping script by Chip Campbell to swap visually-selected text * provides mappings to swap adjacent words or selected text around a "pivot" * swap two words as M-t (transpose words) in Emacs or bash * swap two columns (words) in one line or multiple selected lines * swap delimited words *vim-tip-swap-word variation on the topic that avoids side effects like polluting registers See also *Moving lines up or down mappings to move lines up/down, with re-indenting *Transposing script to move current or selected lines up/down Comments Swap all lines in a visual selected block When working with arrays I sometimes realize that I have to do things in the opposite order. To easily change this I created this small function: function SwapAll() range if a:firstline != a:lastline if a:firstline < a:lastline let first=a:firstline let last=a:lastline else let first=a:lastline let last=a:firstline endif while first < last exec first.'m'.last.'|'.(last-1).'m'.(first-1) let first=first+1 let last=last-1 endwhile endif endfunction vmap :call SwapAll() vnoremap :call SwapAll() --December 4, 2013